Tycho Brahe's dwarf and elk

From an email that BB pal Ben Cosgrove sent me:
I was recently looking up some information on my all-time favorite
nose-less astronomer, Tycho Brahe, and came across this information in
Wikipedia. I include it here, unedited, because 1) it is entertaining,
and 2) it reads like something written in one language, translated into
another, and then quickly rendered back into the original by someone
distracted by a shiny object. Completely insane:

Tycho was said to own one percent of the entire wealth of Denmark at one
point in the 1580s and he often held large social gatherings in his
castle. He kept a dwarf named Jepp (whom Tycho believed to be
clairvoyant) as a court jester who sat under the table during dinner.
Pierre Gassendi wrote that Tycho also had a tame elk (or moose) and that
his mentor, Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel, asked whether there was
an animal faster than a deer. Tycho replied, writing that there was
none, but he could send his tame elk. When Wilhelm replied he would
accept one in exchange for a horse, Tycho replied with the sad news that
the elk had just died on a visit to entertain a nobleman at Landskrona.
Apparently during dinner the elk had drunk a lot of beer, fallen down
the stairs, and died.

23 Responses to “Tycho Brahe's dwarf and elk”

Tycho’s relationship with Jepp was probably a lot more complex than indicated here. I believe that Tycho touted Jepp’s clairvoyant abilities in order to avoid requests to interpret horoscopes. Tycho could cast the chart and when asked what it meant point to Jepp who would promptly spout nonsense which was a particular talent of his. To which Tycho could nod and follow up with “He’s pychic”.

Tycho was the first Hollywood bad boy and amateur scientist. Blowing off steam with bizarre entertainments then calming down with the slow pace of astronomical observations. The real-life Buckaroo Banzaii.

@ROSSINDETROIT: Possibly. He was exhumed (again) last year for further tests which appear to be inconclusive, because he was reburied in November with great pomp and no clear announcement of his cause of death (yet).

In May 2007, while I was living in Copenhagen, I was lucky enough to visit the island (Ven in Swedish, Hven in Danish) where he had his observatories. It’s a very beautiful place, and we visited the Stjerneborg observatory (now a multimedia exhibition … and not a very good one, unfortunately) and the site of Uraniborg, which is mostly ornamental gardens:

An elk (called moose in US English(*)) can get dead drunk on just a bucket of slightly fermented windfall apples. Despite their size (European elks is much smaller then American elks (aka moose), but they can still weight as much as a metric tonne), they have a much lower tolerance for alcohol then humans. This is actually a real problem as drunken elks trash gardens in Sweden during fall. Fortunately, they are usually not aggressive during that part of the year (they are during mating and when caring for their calfes, but no Swedes have ever get troubled by angry elks, it is just ignorant tourists and immigrants that get attacked and occasionally killed).

As for the “funny language” of the wikipedia article, could a native English user please explain what it is that make it “funny”, so that I can improve my English. I’m not actually a Danish speaker myself, but a Swedish speaker (well, West Geatish actually, if you, as some people do, use the English term “Swedish” only for SveamÃ¥l, NorrlÃ¤ndska and Finlandssvenska), but my language is almost identical to Danish (or my language is at least as similar to Danish as Scottish English is to Texan English, more then 1/4 of the “Swedish” speakers in Sweden, actually speak East Danish dialects (Geatish is not one of those dialects)) and I have always hard when I have to express my thoughts within the limitations of the English language. It is so much that just can’t be expressed in English (at least not without sounding very long-winded, or “funny”) and we speakers of Scandinavian languages are not trained to reduce our thoughts to the level of vagueness that English require (it isn’t even possible to be that vague in most Scandinavian dialects, as that in itself would express uncertainty of the speaker/writer). It might sound funny to native English speakers when we try to write/speak English, but to someone used to more expressive and precise languages, it as frustrating as trying to make a wristwatch out of twigs and dust, with no tools available, the obvious solution is to make a sundial instead, but we are used to something better and it is painful for us to limit ourself.

(*) Most Europeans immigrating to Northern US had never seen an elk(**), but had heard stories about them. When they saw large deer (wapitis), they thought they where the elks of the old tales.
(**) Although almost a pest in most of Europe today, European elks was almost extinct at that time period and still are extinct in the parts of Europe that has the most dense human population. They where saved by legal protection in Scandinavia and Russia during the 18th and 19th century.